Preview The New Audrey Hepburn Anniversary Exhibition

Trans Vision: How Transgender Went Mainstream

As Caitlyn Jenner makes her Vanity Fair cover debut - revealing her name for the very first time, and breaking Twitter records by reaching one million followers in just four hours - are blurred gender lines the latest cultural fixation? Maya Singer posed the question in the May 2015 issue of Vogue.

The Crying Game is playing," I told Brad, scanning the listings in the local paper. "If we hurry, we could catch the next show." It was the summer of 1993, I was a teenager, lifeguarding at the local pool, and Brad was the guy I'd been seeing. He was a swimmer, strapping and straightforward, majoring in business at the University of Florida. My shift at the pool had been rained off, so he picked me up and we went to see the obscure movie I'd selected.

Advertisement

Jaye Davidson as Dil in The Crying Game

Rex Features

We bought popcorn and Cokes, and huddled up together. Maybe you've seen The Crying Game. If so, you'll recall that there's a twist late in the film. It happens in the middle of a frank love scene between Jimmy, the protagonist, and Dil, his mysterious inamorata. Jimmy peels off Dil's dress, the camera pans down the length of her body, and then - holy smoke - we see her penis.

Read next

Generation Gender Neutral

ByVogue

Brad leapt to his feet. "I'm gonna throw up," he said, running from the auditorium. I watched the rest of The Crying Game alone, absorbed, and when it was over, I found Brad outside. "Did you know that was going to happen?" he asked me, a look of panic in his eyes. That was our last date.

I hadn't thought about Brad much until lately. His shocked reaction that day flashed into my mind as I watched Jared Leto playing a transgender woman in Dallas Buyers Club, and again when I saw Laverne Cox, star of Orange Is the New Black and transgender pin-up, on the cover of Time magazine. And when I binged on the first season of the Amazon series Transparent, which follows a Los Angeles family as its middle-aged patriarch announces his intention to live as a woman, I kept wondering: what does Brad make of all of this? Transgender narratives are entering the mainstream. How many cinemas can the Brads of this world storm out of?

Advertisement

Eddie Redmayne plays a transitioning man in The Danish Girl released next year

"Trans" - and by that I mean everything connected to people who do not conform to conventional notions of gender as a biologically defined state - is having a moment. Right now, over in Denmark, Eddie Redmayne is filming The Danish Girl, an adaptation of David Ebershoff's bestselling novel about the first man to undergo gender-reassignment surgery. Lena Dunham's next project is a documentary about Bindle & Keep, a tailor in Brooklyn that caters to the trans community. Candy, "the first transversal style magazine", recently shot a gatefold cover with 14 trans celebrities. Transgender models such as Lea T and Andreja Pejic walk runways and front campaigns for major fashion and beauty houses. In America, Laverne Coxand writer Janet Mock have emerged as spokespeople for the increasingly visible and increasingly vocal transgender community. I could go on.

Elle Fanning in Gaby Dellal's as-yet-untitled film

Rex Features

Read next

Caitlyn: “There's More to Being a Woman Than Make-Up”

ByLauren Milligan

And the changes go beyond pop culture. A good friend has a brother who used to be her sister; that's sort of a big deal to her family, but mostly it's not. They all get along fine, in the fractious way of close-knit kin. Which is precisely the tone struck by Transparent, the Golden Globe-winning series inspired by creator Jill Soloway's own experience of her father's decision, later in life, to transition. Perhaps the most groundbreaking thing about Transparent is that it treats the theme with a light touch: when Mark, played by Jeffrey Tambor, comes out to his children as Maura, it's shattering, of course, but it's also just another event in the long list of things that either bind a family or fray it apart. Tambor's character never loses her place as the family's rock, and the show's moral centre. Transgender storytelling is losing its shock value. It's become domesticated.

Advertisement

Jeffrey Tambor as Maura in the award-winning Transparent

"When I originally pitched this film a few years ago, I was told that audiences may not be able to stomach the subject," says Gaby Dellal, the British director of an as-yet-untitled forthcoming film about transgender. Like Transparent, her film takes on the knotty subject of a family contending with someone's decision to transition; Susan Sarandon, Naomi Watts and Elle Fanning play grandmother, mother and teenage daughter-becoming-son, respectively. But even though her film addresses gender reassignment head-on, Dellal resists characterisation of it as a "trans" narrative.

"This was not to be an 'issue' film," she notes. "I just wanted to explore the dynamics and dramas within a modern-day, middle-class family." Of course, representing gender reassignment as par for the course is inherently political.

And Dellal doesn't shy away from that interpretation. "As artists, it is up to us to educate and expose what's going on in our society without judging it," she asserts. "During my research, I met some extraordinary kids who are successfully dealing with not being cisgender [the term for people who consider themselves aligned with their biological gender] and who are undergoing gender reassignment. I would like this film to help normalise their situation and broaden all of our minds."

Read next

Caitlyn Apologises For "Man In A Dress" Comments

ByLauren Milligan

You can't talk about gender transition without getting on to the topic of clothes. All people - all 7 billion of us - use clothes as a vehicle for storytelling, knowingly or not. We get dressed, and thereby show the world who we are: which micro-demographic we belong to, how we're different from the rest of our tribe. In many parts of the world, women have myriad options of how to represent themselves: girly, tomboyish, polished, casual, sexy, subdued. Fashion is all about creating remixes of these basic choices. Now consider the position of a man who is becoming a woman. How do you begin the process of figuring out what kind of woman you should be? What role do clothes play in that?

Laverne Cox on the cover of Time

Gucci womenswear A/W15

Indigital

I raise this with Hari Nef, a 21-year-old actress and writer who is transitioning. Narrow framed, her hair cut short and her face usually left make-up free, she's been making a name as a model in New York. For her, fashion didn't come at the end of determining whether to become a woman; fashion started that process. "I grew up on the internet," Nef says, "and I was always looking at fashion online, maybe partly because I have a mother who loves clothes. You know," she adds with a laugh, "the usual gay-fashion-boy story. I was really drawn to Alexander McQueen. I'd been into fantasy as a kid. But then I remember looking at collections by designers like Calvin Klein, who operate from a totally different point of view, and it struck me how fashion offers all these options on how to be a woman.

Read next

Caitlyn's Style Crush Revealed

ByLauren Milligan

"There's a script with menswear," Nef goes on. "Whereas women are given room to explore. And I wanted to explore, too. I started to daydream about a certain woman, like a gay designer having a muse. Eventually, though, that woman took over my body and I had to become her."

Andreja Pejic walks for Giles A/W15

Indigital

Much of the conversation about transgender experience revolves around the idea of destiny. Dellal describes the transgender youths she met while researching her film as people who have suffered a "mismatch", and for whom gender reassignment is a correction. Nef doesn't object to that description but she'd like "cis" folk to see that transitioning involves a lot of decision-making. "Along the way I've been asking questions like would I rather have things be easy, in certain ways, and live as a man? Or would I rather feel beautiful? The choices extend to fashion because I've been constructing an identity. That is a specifically trans experience. Everything was acquired."

The choices have multiplied as Nef's hormones have kicked in and she's begun to look more feminine. She notes that a lot of transgender women gravitate to a very conventional "Barbie" femininity because they feel that's the only way to pass as women. But she prefers "almost no make-up, jeans, a little camisole… You could say I'm trying to pass as a 'natural' woman. You could describe me as a bit of a tomboy."

Dan Stevens in a still from the "Rachel" episode of High Maintenance

Just as there's no one way to be a woman, there's no one way to be transgender. Transparent illustrates this with clothes: Maura's bohemian sense of style, Soloway tells me, "is referencing powerful women from her heyday of the early Seventies." Gloria Steinem, Joni Mitchell, Sue Mengers. "She isn't trying to become a perfect representative of conventional femininity," Soloway says of Tambor's character. "She's trying to discover and access her own, individual sense of femininity. She gravitates toward clothing and accessories that suit her understanding of herself, and that sense of complete ease Maura exudes - say, when she's wearing one of her kaftans - is what makes her so beautiful."

Advertisement

The quest for one's own individual sense of femininity is a sentiment pretty much anyone can identify with, even "cis" men. Take the character played by Dan Stevens in the "Rachel" episode of the hit online series High Maintenance: your average Brooklyn dude - a scruffy, struggling writer with a wife and a young kid - who happens to like wearing Rachel Comey dresses. One of the most interesting effects of mainstreaming trans is that it's beginning to break down the old gender binaries. We've entered the era of grey areas.

The creators of High Maintenance, Katja Blichfeld and Ben Sinclair, call this trend "gender fuck". "All of a sudden there's this space where people can mix traits from both genders," Blichfeld says. "I mean, Dan's character, he has a beard, he wears men's sport socks, but he's also got on this silky dress. And it's kind of like, 'So what?'"

When a response to a man in a frock might be merely a shrug, something has shifted. "We've come a long way just in the last two years," says Dellal, citing the fact that her own film, initially rejected by the studios, is now in the can. "We need to recognise the need for multi-genders and not be restricted by binary concepts." Are you listening, Brad?

This article was first published in the May 2015 issue of Vogue magazine